Keeping Your Health Stats On Track

Last Saturday, I volunteered for a 5K with an organization called Girls on the Run. Girls on the Run is a fantastic organization focused on improving girls’ self-esteem by introducing them to the sport of running. The program meets after school, in schools across the country, to play games constructed around confidence building and physical fitness. As the conclusion for the program, the girls run a timed 5K together.

As a volunteer, I was responsible for collecting the timing bands and placing them on a sheet with their corresponding number. The process was simple and straightforward but honestly, it was pretty gross from the sweat and terribly time consuming.

As I was placing bands in their corresponding location, I was chatting with another volunteer there. At one point I said:

“Imagine having to organize these timing bands for a race of 30,000 people instead of 800!”

At that point, he reminded me that many individuals in the large races have personal timing chips that they purchased on their own and reuse. For many competitive runners, having their timing number registered online is helpful so they can track and store the times of the multiple races they compete in. Although not all timing systems will allow personal chip numbers, most will without any problem.

And then it hit me. From a technical perspective, timing a race is not all that different than issuing and storing patient identification numbers in a hospital. Of course, patient safety and patient matching are much more important in the health care setting, there are still a few similarities.

You have to register the individual.

Store the information that is collected during a specified time period.

Provide access to that information following the event.

There are a few distinctions though:

Most runners won’t stay after to wait for the results to be posted after the event. The running community has responded to this will now post the results online, exclusively. Similarly, most patients would like to access records online, but that functionality is not yet available at most care delivery organizations.

Most hospitals won’t allow the patient to provide their own patient identification number. Some are doing this in the form of personal health records, or PHRs, but currently that functionality is limited.

As my volunteer friend mentioned above, personal chip numbers not only provide a glimpse of the benefits of PHRs, but are a great demonstration that individuals are willing and able to take responsibility for their information.

As we move progress in the health care industry, it will become increasingly important to identify parallels in other industries where systems and infrastructures are working successfully. I believe that personal timing chips provide some indication on the future success of PHRs, because at a minimal level, I know individuals are willing to purchase and maintain their personal data collected from their athletic performance.

We have mentioned a few parallels to health care on this site before such as personal finance and travel. Are there any other analogies you can think of that could provide some direction for future health care and health IT initiatives?

Erica Olenski

Erica V. Olenski currently serves as an account executive at Corepoint Health. She has focused her research and professional experience in healthcare communications and new media opportunities within the healthcare IT industry.
Erica is a leader in the health IT social media community, serving as the VP of Communications for the HIMSS DFW Board of Directors for 2011-2012, and was the founder of the #HITsm (healthcare IT social media) tweet chat held each Friday at 11 a.m. CT. (For more information on the #HITsm chat, visit: http://ow.ly/536eu)
For updates on healthcare IT and social media, follow her on Twitter: @TheGr8Chalupa.

Get the HealthStandards.com monthly newsletter

Universities have a lot of similarities (in fact, at one point, our university was told by the system lawyers that, because we had a medical school and computers in the student health center, all of our IT had to be HIPAA compliant, but that’s another story). We have to maintain confidentiality, by law, of student academic records, and have to use an identifier that isn’t associated with more common identifiers, such as Social Security or Drivers’ License numbers. Systems like that abound in IT already, and there are varying levels of strong and weak authentication/authorization systems to allow access.

Using our university as an example, we use moderate strength passwords changed semi-annually, and a “universal” identifier for AuthN, with AuthZ based on administratively derived roles. Access to student records by a student is straightforward for reading, but only selected records are available for modification, including personal data and demographics.

Not all such systems (e.g. PeopleSoft) are appropriate or secure enough for health records, but it’d be a significant improvement if patients were able to access their own records, andlab results rather than waiting for a follow-up call or letter to explain them… sometimes with explanations that require another office visit simply to translate.

Nice post over above. Its good to start those movements which help to make healthy of them. There are many diseases as

hemorrhoid
which needs

hemorrhoid
treatment
earlier. A
hemorrhoid
diseased person can’t run comfortably . Some other diseases make the persons even helpless that they could not even walk.The need is to overcome from the diseases to live better life.

Connect

#HITSM Chat

Moderated by Chad Johnson, @OchoTex, HealthStandards.com Editor and Corepoint Health Senior Marketing Manager. November 18th will be the last #HITsm chat under @HealthStandards. Celebrate ‘Passing the #HITsm torch’ to @techguy @HealthcareScene.

The first #HITsm tweet chat was held almost six years ago on Jan 10, 2011. Since that time, we have hosted approximately 280 #HITsm chats. While some of you may have participated in that very first chat (only 15 actually participated), I’m proud to say that the chats and the community have continued to grow […]

Podcasts

Artificial intelligence is a topic that isn’t going away in the health IT and medical community. One reason it’s come as far as it has is thanks to open sourcing, or shared data. Today’s guest, Fred Trotter, has a lot to say about the Vice President’s Cancer Moonshot initiative – which he was recognized for […]